git commit murder

Chapter 4

4

Dale had built his laptop himself, using parts he’d ordered straight from Asian factories: two processors on a thoughtfully hand-selected motherboard, seventeen-inch ultra-high-res screen, enough hard drive to hold the good bits of the Library of Congress and enough memory to keep all the files in use off the disk. A full-size keyboard, including a number pad. The burnished aluminum case was the expensive part—Dale’s high school buddy Brian made them, in the fabricating shop in his family’s barn.

He pressed the power button. White text flashed past on the black screen while he rooted through the tangle of cables for the power cord. He really had to organize this mess. The Velcro cable ties were sitting on the shelf at home, he just had to sit down and coil everything up nicely. But before the laptop hit the logon screen, he had the laptop plugged in.

Most computers booted to a pretty logon screen with, say, a soothing shade of blue and a welcoming invitation to type your password. Maybe a picture of a flower or a kitten in the background. Something that promised a pleasant, even fun experience.

This laptop’s logon screen was black, displaying the word “Login” and a colon in the upper left corner.

People told Dale his computer didn’t look friendly. Dale always said it was perfectly friendly—it just was choosy about who its friends were. The BSD Unix operating systems dated from the early days of computing, when a “portable computer” came with wheels and a hernia belt. Descendants of that software ran the core of the Internet, and didn’t cost a penny. Yes, some people used commercial variants from big companies like IBM, and other people liked other free operating systems, but Dale liked the stability, performance, and sense of history this system gave him.

Dale entered his username—dsw, for Dale Shirley Whitehead—and the meaningless mishmash of two dozen characters and letters and symbols that served as his password. The computer rewarded him with another blank screen and a single symbol.

$

The laptop had finished saying its piece. Now it was Dale’s chance to begin a dialog.

The room around Dale faded as he connected to the Byward Guest wireless network and connected to his home system. His powerful laptop was now only a screen and keyboard, funneling what Dale typed to a small computer in his bedroom closet. He had that computer connect him to still another machine.

Dale had found this system last month. As far as he could tell, it was in Indonesia, or maybe Malaysia, and handled a dozen email accounts for a small company. The company’s computer staff hadn’t applied security patches since setting the system up last year. Dale hadn’t found breaking into it difficult at all.

Dale wasn’t exactly a hacker. Lots of people would have used this unknown company’s email server to, say, knock competitors off of online gaming sites, or maybe express their annoyance with whatever mega-corporation had displeased them. Dale had broken in, yes, but he’d cleaned the server up. If the server was a house, Dale was an uninvited guest who nonetheless fixed the broken windows and put the rear door back on its hinges. Yes, he’d set the system to not log his activity, but that was basic self-protection.

And he made absolutely sure the system owners got their e-mail.

Otherwise, they might call someone to fix the machine.

Really, he provided them a service.

He had maybe a dozen machines like this, all over the world.

And if everything went well this week, Dale would have a few million more machines at his disposal.

A million places to hide, to get away, where nobody would think to look for him.

Dale loved computers. He loved the layers of understanding you needed to really get them, all the way up from the NAND gate to the Java Runtime Engine. A billion billion details, yes—but ultimately knowable. If you were smart enough, if you studied enough, you could understand all the rules. You could predict exactly what the machine would do.

Exactly unlike people.

Penetrating these systems only meant that he understood them better than the person supposedly responsible for them.

He might be trapped in Ottawa.

But on a mental level, nobody could find him.

He’d escaped without leaving his assigned room.

Dale had that system forward his connection to a similar system in the Czech Republic, then one somewhere in Canada. He’d secured each of those neglected machines and erased his footprints, but on this last computer he’d installed a bunch of tools he could use for his own purposes.

Like getting back into the Byward University network.

Focusing on the task at hand rather than what it meant, Dale slipped commands through a gap into the Byward University facilities network—not the student network, but the network used to support the university infrastructure, like the lights and heat.

And the residence hall registration system.

With a connection dragged around the world, through who knew how many different networks, the latency between typing a letter and that letter appearing on the screen drove Dale to keep his mind blank to starve his impatience. He waited for the full text of each command to appear before hitting ENTER, so that a misplaced keystroke wouldn’t damage the fragile chain of connections.

Even with the lag, Dale quickly found the entry for his registration: his full name, the conference schedule, dates, and most important—the twenty-four-digit numerical identifier for his key card.

He copied that number.

Another burst of typing brought up the list of administrative key cards issued to janitors, housekeepers, and maintenance men. These cards opened every lock in the building.

Dale couldn’t just add his card to the list. A sharp-eyed administrator would certainly notice a list of seventy-four items suddenly becoming seventy-five.

But he could identify a card that hadn’t been used in three months.

And substitute his number in its place.

The key card in Dale’s pants pocket suddenly felt warm.

It’s not that Dale wanted to open any card-controlled door in the residence hall.

But if things went bad, if he screwed up talking to people and had to flee, he could.

The tension bled out of Dale’s back. A breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding sagged out of his chest, and he worked his jaw to unclamp it.

Backing down the chain of computers was easier than getting in. Holding down the control key and repeatedly hitting D logged him out of Byward University, then out of the Canadian relay, the Czech one, and Indonesia, each computer responding more quickly than the one before it.

Dale might be among strangers a thousand miles from home, but he was logged onto his home computer.

If you can’t escape in meatspace, get away in cyberspace.

The worn plastic chair chilled his clammy back, and the vaguely stale air burned in his nose. Dale rolled his shoulders, trying to break up the knots in his back, and sipped flat airport water from the half-empty bottle stuffed in the side of his backpack.

Now his email. He’d tried a bunch of the fancy mail clients, but kept going back to the text-only simplicity of mutt.

He answered Mom first, reassuring her that he’d made it to Ottawa just fine and the flight had been just fine and that he was, really and truly, just fine. A couple cousins sending pictures, those could wait. A couple social network messages—you’ve been tagged, we love you, return to us! Delete, delete, delete. Those social media companies still couldn’t improve on the Internet Relay Chat computer geeks had used for decades.

Dale’s boss Will had sent an email half an hour ago, though. He’d probably better actually read that.

Dale,

I’ve been to many tech conferences. There is a bar. There is _always_ a bar.

You’re there to make contacts. We need these people kindly disposed towards us. Get out of your room. I expect expense reports, remember? And they better have other people’s drinks on them. Get those problem reports closed.

:WQ

Well, crap.

Dale was gonna need more shirts.